Democrats: We Care About People

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked which party people thought was "most attuned and sensitive to issues that affect" various groups in society. (My apologies if the link doesn't lead anywhere that looks appropriate; I saw this poll on a poll-aggregating site, not on its own direct web page.) They asked this question for the following groups: religious conservatives, men and women in the military, small business owners, retirees, you and your family, stay-at-home moms, the middle class, working women, young adults under 30 years old, Hispanics or Latinos, and gays and lesbians. Interestingly, though this isn't my main point, most of these are groups that it is typically considered a self-evident good to be attuned to the interests of, but, notably, a whole lot of people would not feel that way regarding religious conservatives, including me, and a substantial but declining number would not feel that way about gay people. That probably explains why those questions produce such imbalanced results, because one of the political poles is proud to declare itself as attuned to that group's interests and the other pole is happy to accuse their opponents of being so attuned. But, as I say, not my main point.


My main point is that the Democrats have a nice sizeable advantage in this poll. They have a lead for eight of the eleven groups, with the military and small business owners as narrow Republican edges and religious conservatives, as I said, being a lopsided "advantage" for Republicans. But let's consider a slightly different metric than just the Democrats minus Republicans margin, because the poll also prompted respondents with two further answers. They could also say that the two parties were "about the same" or that "neither party is good here." (The use of "good" is interesting in light of my earlier point.) So let's construct a figure for each party-group combination, which is the percentage of respondents saying they feel that party is more attuned to that group's interests plus the percentage saying they think the two parties are about the same. Why this metric? Because these are the people for whom an attack against that party as being indifferent to the interests of this group will not be effective. If you think both parties are lousy, it's possible for one party to manage to leverage their opponent's lousiness particularly well, but if you think both parties are, you know, about the same, pretty decent, whatever, then it's just not going to be an effective partisan issue.

And once we look at things this way, the Democrats' advantage becomes even stronger. They have an outright majority by this metric for all but two categories, religious conservatives obviously and small business owners. Because 31% of people think that the two parties are similar in their sensitivity to military issues, there's a majority who feel Democrats are solid there even though a plurality think Republicans do better than Democrats. For four groups, the Democrats are over 60% (gays, Hispanics, youngsters, and working women). For each of those groups, Republicans do no better than 40%, meaning that they're genuinely vulnerable to attack on this score. Republicans also have mediocre numbers, 44% and 45% respectively, for "the middle class" and "you and your family," suggesting some marginal weakness in these areas, and they're not good areas in which to be even marginally weak. Interestingly, the "small business owners" and "you and your family" categories are roughly mirror images of each other, the former being 37% R, 31% D, 15% about the same, and the latter being 30% R, 37% D, 15% about the same. This explains why Republicans like to talk about small businesses, but I have a hard time believing they can succeed making small business owners a more important group in the national dialogue than "you and your family."

All of this is basically just one more piece of confirmation that the American people like the Democratic Party better than they like the Republicans Party right now. I think that's been the case ever since, well, Katrina, with 2010 perhaps looking like a brief exception although I think it was really just a case of freak turnout asymmetries. Now, evidently that doesn't mean Obama will win re-election, as the impetus of people's preference for Democrats on a whole host of issues is in conflict with the flagrantly irrational but apparently very real desire to vote mechanistically anti-incumbent when the world is in a state of disarray. Romney is, of course, talking up that latter impulse, and trying to present it as sensible and good. Here's hoping he fails in that quest, and people vote for the party they actually like a bit better.